


Coming home

by Kyra



Category: Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Genre: F/M, Identity, Running Away, Secrets, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 17:28:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2317547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra/pseuds/Kyra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's always liked secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming home

**Author's Note:**

> Um, I wrote this in May 2004 and am putting it here for ... posterity?
> 
> Warnings for self-harm and unconsummated adopted sibling incest. Same as the movie, basically.

_"And I didn't run away to come home the same."_ \-- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

 

When she was twelve, writing what would become the second of Three Plays on her mother's old typewriter in the upstairs bedroom, Margot stared out the window and thought: what's the point of anything, really?

This was not notable for its originality.  It was hardly the first time the thought had crossed human minds, or even her own -- and probably would have been completely forgotten had it not ended up as a line in Act III.

What was important was the way it felt on her tongue, later, as she shivered on the roof and smoked her second cigarette of the night. Weighty and real, like it was one of the few things that actually meant something, while everything else felt more and more fake. A question without an answer, but that didn't stop her from looking.

There's this thing she doesn't have a word for but it feels like a hole. Like Chas's eyes, glancing at her from the other window, as the taxi holding Royal and Richie pulled away every weekend. She used to think it was family-shaped; saved her money and ran away (again) when she was fourteen, staring at her unsmiling, dark-haired reflection in the bus window, wondering what she would find that she didn't already know from the adoption papers she'd stolen out of the filing cabinet. Instead she came home even less, with an excuse to spend the rest of high school staring at the place where her finger had been and thinking about emptiness.

She's always liked secrets: what isn't secret is just fodder for everyone to see, to comment on. (Royal's taught her things even if he never meant to.) Secrets are something she can control. Secrets mean nobody knows who she really is, which makes it seem a little more okay if it turns out she doesn't, either.

All the pictures Richie has ever painted of her make her look so strange. She doesn't mind that, but looking at them she feels the weight of the empty space surrounding her in each one, all added together.

Behind her the tent-flap rustles as it opens. Today Richie had his stitches taken out, and she doesn't want to see what his arms look like now. She wants to remember the jagged, black slits, bloody closed eyes.

Margot keeps her arms wrapped around herself, keeps looking straight ahead at the wall, at all her own repeated faces. Behind her Richie is so close she can feel the heat of his body, without touching. She wants to say, is this how you see me? She doesn't say anything.

"You should write a play," Richie says. "About the Green Line."

Neither of them says anything for a long time. She thinks of the seats of the bus, sticky on the back of her legs as she and Richie hid for what felt like hours, waiting until they could sneak into the museum. How every time he woke up there the look of panic and disorientation on his face melted away as soon as he saw her.

His fingertips touch the small of her back. Her shiver feels like points, like secrets, like being filled.

"Okay," she says.


End file.
